I've been waiting to pick up another graphics card to go SLI, but my card is still $400. When do you guys think Nvidia 7xx desktop series will drop? No doubt the price of my card will go down. Who's going to buy a 7xx series card? It's only a refresh, so I'm sticking with 6xx for now.
I'm in the market for a new graphics card, but not planning to go overboard by any means. Aiming at a gtx670 which is fairly inexpensive for what you get. Got a gtx470 now, and that is fine for most my needs, but it's getting old and is about to fail. Earlier today, it froze up my PC whilst idling (just some video playing) and went BSOD on my ass. nvlddmkm.sys stopped responding. After checking out the usual suspects, the problem persisted. Luckily I had a third-party cooler ready to install onto the card. With the stock cooler it easily got up to 90'C during load and 55-75'C when idling. Now it runs at 35-40'C when idle and 55-60'C under load. And more important, is stable. That is, had to do some tweaking in the settings for it to run openGL applications again. But it ran War-Thunder (under directX) fine for a couple of hours with no hiccups after the new cooler was installed. Something have broken on it though from going really warm during gaming. As long as I keep it cool, it's fine. Should it get really warm again, BSOD will be back. So next stop-gap project is installing a 120mm fan on the side-door of my PC. My PC is really cramped, so I'm worried about air-flow. I do have two 80mm fans in the front, but those drag air over the HDs and a bunch of cables and stuff before it reach the GPU. So a fan in the side panel will solve that particular concern. Just have to figure out how to make a clean cut in the aluminium it's made of in order to fit the thing.
Damn 90c is way hot, check your airflow. If you're looking at a 670, I recommend an EVGA 670 FTW. It's a factory overclocked 670 on a 680 board with a 680 cooler. After adjusting the fan profile and overclocking, I hit 65c benchmark, and about 62c gaming. This is overclocked at 1215 mhz. If I end up going SLI soon, I'm going to put a fan on my cases side, aimed between the cards. I don't want to starve my top card of air.
The GF100 based cards (gtx465, gtx470 & gtx480) are known for running hot. 80-90'C is not that unusual. Not saying it's good, but it is how it is. The 6xx range run typically at 60-70'C under load with stock cooler according to my research, which is more acceptable and certainly more safe from a longevity point of view. But yeah, airflow is a problem on my system. Not happy about it. I got everything I need to fix it, but it is a bit of a project. I'm a bit lazy for some reason so I tend to let things be as long as it isn't an acute problem. Is why I had the third party GPU cooler just lying around. I got it some three months ago because my PC grew unstable during load. I suspected a hot GPU, but turned out it was just the CPU heatsink that was caked over. Fixed that, didn't bother changing the GPU cooler. But what a difference when I did install it yesterday. Just go to show how crappy the stock cooler was. Now it runs some 30'C cooler on average. ...and the old cooler. You won't believe this, but the only proper contact-point was to the GPU itself. The VRAM and chipset had some crappy soft cushions fixed to them that was supposed to transport heat from them to the metal of the cooler that was 1-2mm above the chips. A few of these cushions was almost burnt out. And to make things worse, the heatsink did not directly link to cover those components, only the GPU itself. Only the metal of the chassis of the cooler was supposed to dissapate the heat from those components, and that was not even covered by the airflow from the attached fan. Not so with the new cooler. Both the GPU and VRAM/Chipset is covered by proper airflow from two 120mm fans attached to the new cooler. With separate heatsinks for the GPU and other components. With proper contact points directly onto the heatsinks. Well, directly with a nice layer of thermal paste inbetween
Yeah I've heard stories about how hot those cards get haha. If you end up getting a 670, right out of the box it could run up to 80c, but if you set a custom fan profile at stock clocks it shouldn't exceed 70c. The Kepler cards downclock themselves in 13 Mhz increments if the temperature goes above 70c, so that's definitely the temp to aim under. Airflow can definitely be a bitch, especially with a mid-tower case. It's gonne be cramped in my case, considering that I'm gonna have two giant cards, and a sound card next to them. I was considering picking up a new cooler, but the temps I'm seeing aren't too bad and I've heard about issues with my particular card and aftermarket coolers. I just hope that another card doesn't raise my temperatures too much. One thing I really like about my card is that it exhausts air straight out of the back of the case, instead of just moving it around. It creates an airflow problem, though, because my case is set up to be positive pressure. When the fan spins up to max speed (3630 rpm, I think) it creates a giant vacuum in my case and I can feel the airflow being changed. Anyways, there's really not too much released on the 7xx series cards. I think I'm going to skip that series seeing as how it (most likely) won't be a huge improvement fromthe GK104 cards. Maxwell architecture is supposed to be released on the 8xx series sometime in 2014, so I'll go SLI with my card til then.
I just picked up a 660 for this hackintosh I built and i gotta say I'm more than happy for what I paid for it. I wouldn't mind if the 7xx series cards come out so I can pick up another one.
Personally i've stuck with ATI/AMD Products for years and i've never had an issue, about a half year ago i bought the Radeon 7970, best decision ever.
This. My HD6870 is still running games like a champ. It was cheaper than Nvidia It works comparably, if not better than Nvidia. It doesn't hog power, like Nvidia. It runs cool, unlike Nvidia. This has been a no brainer for me the past few years. ATi all the way on GPU, Intel for CPU
Jumped in here not to provide any feedback, but to learn a bit more. Been a while since I built gaming rigs, and was curious as to how things were progressing with ATI vs. nVidia. Looks like it's still pretty competitive, but 90C temps? Damn, you guys should be looking at immersion cooling if you're running that hot. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or4F4KfgUOU]hardcore computer reactor (total liquid submersion pc) , www.mnpctech.com - YouTube[/ame]
Some of the cards come with horrible fans, that could be a part of your problem too. My old HD 4850 eventually flamed out because the fan was too small and overheating became a huge issue. Now on my 6870 in a coolermaster case, 37c under load. lol
Yeah most newer cards, even with stock coolers, won't go over 70c. The 4xx and 5xx cards just ran really hot.
Max my card has ever gotten was 65 * C gaming BF3 max settings 90*C is hot but its not going to mess your card up, but there is no reason for it to run that hot though.
The soon to be available nvidia 650ti boost seems like one heck of a deal. With nvidia having just released the titan and 690 i think itll be a while before they release the highend 7xx's. No sense competing with themselves i suppose. Who knows, amd recently announced they have the fastest gpu a few days ago but idk if that will be enough to make nvidia launch the top tier 7's or not. Im still back in the stoneage with my fx5200 kitten.
A website called gpuboss says that the 7xx series will be released June this year. Whether this is accurate or not I do not know.